Category Archives: Art And Art-like

I will not validate the “truth”
That this dalliance is predicated
Upon an attraction to your youth.
It is a charge to be debated.
But if there is some fact in this,
It does not make less true my kiss.
And you should no more trust my age,
Or learn from me, or call me “sage,”
But your own superior magic trust,
And know that’s what they seek of you;
We “knowing” men, we’ll want and lust.
Dare care not what we speak of you.I’ll take what truths that you bestow,
Gratefully present while you grow.

These short pieces were a long time in coming. Many of them were around three laptops ago… But now they’re here, and that’s about all I’ve got to say about them… Except perhaps that, over the many years that I’ve picked them apart, put them back together, slapped them around, and let them sit, they were fun to write. Perhaps they’ll be fun to read as well. Perhaps you’ll have a look, or a listen… and let me know.

Random clips taken at Soundsmith Studios with the soundsmith himself, Leer Leary.

“The Odd Purgatory of My Personal Perception” is a collection of stories that have been kicked around on one laptop of mine or another for the past 15 years. Some have said that they are not stories at all. Maybe they’re right. Some call them erotic short fiction. Others have said that there is nothing erotic about them. We’ll see…

Above: Recording work on the short story, “God’s Children,” also excerpted below.

…She was God’s child, so he had thought; one of the ones that the Universe looks after because, for whatever reason, they didn’t end up here upon this seething orb of self-serving fuck-ups with the tools to fend for themselves, so he thought… Dumber than a box of rocks, he’d thought, but as delicate and as lovely as an orchid. And she smelled like vanilla ice cream. She was the sort of vacuous that could be beyond sexy when the sexy wore it. And he had not been looking for a lover that would be anything more than that: sexy, immediate, and unencumbering ever after. He had few other reasons to subject himself to a barroom’s sensory barrage of boisterous humanity. Everywhere else, feeling the oppressive weight of its incurious tumbling on, he navigated around the dumb motion of the masses as best his own too human condition could manage. The only thing to be gotten by braving the concentration of festering crowd psychology that a Friday night tavern contained was the prize of some pretty diversion intent on receiving him without superfluous ceremony; something sweet and soft to distract his embattled heart and sate his hunger for an hour or two without making of itself a nuisance in the a.m., and she came dancing up to him from out of the aggregate of noise and dark and compressed bodies in a joint in Seattle, and stood at the bar staring at him, blankly, as her hips swayed to the bass beat of The Isley Brothers singing “Caravan of Love…”

Shit, I’m older now.
Elbows ache and knees more.
“You’re only as strong as your weakest link,” they say.
But I can still drop that twelve pound mall
On the flat of a fat maple log,
Snort hard and send the severed halves flying in submission. Bang!! Fuckin’ay
badass, hardass machine for breakin’ shit,
That’s gotta be what, from the soles of my feet planted,
Swinging through the back, through the shoulders, through the length of my arms,
Through the length of that steel handle, what,
Maybe eight, maybe
Nine hundred foot-pounds at the point of contact at least? I don’t know the math.
My daddy, he’s slow.
Crooked and squat,
His body ain’t no fulcrum
For an axe that heavy swinging any more.
For him, twelve pounds overhead can’t be more than, what,
A hundred or so pounds at the target? Maybe two. I don’t know the math.
I know that dense, wet wood isn’t so scared of him like it used to be when I was small.
He doesn’t seem to mind. Maybe he does.
I do. But he doesn’t say much.
But he’ll whack away at it,
Shuffling and crouching,
Lifting with a grunt to set it right when he’s half missed it, and knocked it
Tumbling off the stump.
Heaving that hammer and dropping it
‘Till that log surrenders, and the halves drop off to either side
like executed soldiers, mostly bludgeoned to death….
Lives can weaken if we don’t nourish them,
So as there’s less for a Spirit to swing from.
That’s not his problem.
Me, I’ll blast through that whole pile of logs and stack it in an hour
So he doesn’t have to, and
So I’ve got something to show.

We could say a lot when we weren’t busy talking.
We could watch the truth of us like television if we wanted
To trust that much. It’s precious few
Who will undertake to keep safe another’s
Unspoken heart.
Most might commit to being nominally responsible for some portion
Of its contents
Declared and described clearly in the language of wants,
Even while knowing that store of goods, truly assessed,
Defies description.
They can sort of sign on for something that is
Sort of defined,
In denial or
Ignoring that,
Being alive,
It’s changeable. And if it doesn’t work out,
No harm, no foul. Though it can be noisy and messy.
But a few,
Who trust in their own unspoken voice,
Knowing those meant to hear it will, can be
Somewhat more still, and
Can hear a lover’s heart speaking itself hoarse;
Telling its everything.
For them, there is no worry. Only the obvious. And
It has no words either.

It’s an Aquarius Full Moon tonight.
Somebody told me that’s what it was, and I saw it, hanging
Bold and unapologizing in the sky, when I let out the dog to do his last of the evening thing.
Being an Aquarius, I suspected that
Ought to have meant something to me. In fact,
I was sure it did. I Googled it and found a lot about it having to do with compassion and
Service and selflessness, yadadayadadayadada. But
For all that,
All I could think of was that
We looked up at it the other night, you and I, and decided that
It wasn’t quite there yet. And that
Later I reached across the cab of the truck and took your hand. Or was it before?

“Does Saturn Have an Aquarius Full Moon?” Acrylic on wood

Either way,
It was like a boy. And
You held my hand, simply, but
Held it,
As if maybe you know a little something
Of boys, and how they’ll
Sometimes reach across the cabs of trucks on warm nights when
The moon is nearly full,
Putting every one of their fears, frustrations, and doubts into the hope that
There’s just a little love over there. And how they’ll wanna
Weep when they find it; wanna
Hide in it, that
Hand they’re holding, but
They’ve been acting like men too long. Tonight,
It’s an Aquarius Full Moon. I wondered
If you saw it. Then
I wondered where you were.

”Roman lay sprawled on his face about the bed, half dreaming, less than half awake, reached for her, his fingers finding, feeling the contour of an uncovered hip, his touch her stirring, turning from him, a long, irregular breath, exhaling, pressing her back against him, and he wishing he could be outside of himself on mornings like these; outside of himself, invisible, and watching the two of them together, waking, and behaving like two do when their only acquaintance has been made by the trial and error of an unplanned, first time tryst; when the light of the morning reveals that they are beautiful.”

I heard the old man on the train talking about his new hip replacement
In explanation of why
He got up so carefully, slowly,
Graciously exchanging seats with the waiting family of five.
I asked,
“How long have you had it?” and
The man began to speak to me about it as if no one had asked in a long time,
Or ever.
He said, wide-eyed, almost hopefully,
“You know about hips?” and
I told the man, smiling, almost apologetic,
“Well… not that kind…” I was just asking.
The man told me –
He seemed eager to continue the conversation –
He thought I might be a doctor the way I inquired,
Which got me thinking,
While the old man spoke,
What would now be different if I had, in fact, been
A physician sitting on the train reading my book
Who had gone to school for nine years to become one, and
Then had practiced for several more, and married, and
Made babies
(Like the couple with the two children and grandma in the next seats over,
All looking quite content on their way to the baseball game) and
Now I was indeed inquiring,
Asking about the man’s new hip
Because I knew all about them, and
I genuinely cared about others, and
My heart was huge, and
Open?